apparently designed to propagate race hatred, is offered to the youth of
these countries as an aid towards the consolidation of the Empire. It is
a case not merely of the poisoning of a well, but of the poisoning of a
great river at its source. The force of cowardice can no farther go. So
long as it goes thus far, so long as the Froudes find Fletchers to echo
them, Irishmen will inevitably "brood over the past." We do not share
the cult of ancestor-worship, but we hold the belief that the Irish
nation, like any other, is an organism endowed with a life in some sort
continuous and repetitive of its origins. To us it does matter something
whether our forerunners were turbulent savages, destitute of all
culture, or whether they were valiant, immature men labouring through
the twilight of their age towards that dawn which does not yet flush our
own horizon. But we are far from wishing that dead centuries should be
summoned back to wake old bitterness that ought also to be dead. Hand
history over to the scholars, if you will; let it be marshalled as a
multitudinous and coloured pageant, to incite imaginations and inspire
literature. Such is our desire, but when we read the clotted nonsense of
persons like Mr Fletcher we can only repeat: _Que messieurs les
assassins commencent_!

For the purpose of this inquiry it is inevitable that some brief account
should be rendered of the past relations between England and Ireland.
The reader need not shrink back in alarm; it is not proposed to lead him
by the reluctant nose through the whole maze and morass of Irish
history. The past is of value to political realists only in that residue
of it which survives, namely, the wisdom which it ought to have taught
us. Englishmen are invited to consider the history of Ireland solely
from that point of view. They are prayed to purge themselves altogether
of pity, indignation, and remorse; these are emotions far too beneficent
to waste on things outside the ambit of our own immediate life. If they